Britiske Climategate-forskere frifundet

The latest report is by the British House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee, which largely absolved Philip Jones, head of UEA's Climate Research Unit and author of most of the e-mails. How can we tell that it's a whitewash? Here are some telltale signs:

* It refers to the e-mails as "stolen"
* It did not take direct testimony from scientifically competent skeptics
* Yet it derives the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the basic science and that warming is human caused – essentially endorsing the IPCC

Singer appeared in the polemic documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle which asserted that the mainstream view on global warming was "a lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times".

Men i dag har en komité, nedsat af det britiske parlament, renset forskningsinstituttet CRU for anklagerne.

Ligeledes konkluderer komiteen, at kritikken af professoren i høj grad har været uberettiget.

Den britiske undersøgelseskomite finder da heller ikke, at email-korrespondancen rokker ved det billede.

mernild skrev:
Det var en god paaskenyhed. Man kan haabe, at den uberetttigede heksejagt er over en gang for alle...

hmm....!

Singer is skeptical of scientific findings on human-induced global warming, the connection between CFCs and ozone depletion, and the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer.

Most dizzying turn-around of a climate skeptic:

Fred Singer "global warming is not happening" (1998,2000, 2002, 2005)

Fred Singer: global warming is "unstoppable" (2006)

De fleste har altid været overbevist om, at det hele var en stor sammensværgelse, og det vil de være, uanset hvad der kommer af lig på bordet. Hvis udredningen af CRU-sagen viser, at der ikke har været manipuleret med data, vil de kalde det en hvidvask og prøve at finde et eller andet andet.

Med tiden vil rækken af involverede i climategate også omfatte visse whitewashere, det er meget at de tør. Alle med urent trav skal stå til regnskab.

Hvad vil fremtiden bringe?
Lad os slutte af med et par forudsigelser for 2010:

1) Undersøgelseskommissionerne vil komme frem til, at der ikke er skyggen af tegn på manipulation med CRUs datasæt, ligesom Michael Mann vil gå fri også af den sidste anklage om 'dårlig videnskabelig opførsel'.

2) Klimaskeptikerne vil kalde undersøgelserne af CRU og Mann for 'hvidvaskninger', hvorefter beskyldningerne vil fortsætte med uformindsket styrke med krav om nedsættelse af nye kommissioner.

3) 2010 vil blive det varmest målte år nogensinde på trods af, at solens opvarmende indflydelse pt. er meget svag.

4) Skeptikerne vil skifte 'Global opvarmning stoppede i 1998' ud og i stedet slå på, at varmerekorden for 2010 skyldtes El Niño (og så skynde sig hurtigt hen over, at varmerekorden i 1998 og den efterfølgende tilsyneladende midlertidige opbremsning også skyldtes El Niño). Og når 2011 viser sig at være en anelse koldere end 2010, vil de hævde, at den globale opvarmning nu er stoppet (igen igen).

Det var en god paaskenyhed. Man kan haabe, at den uberetttigede heksejagt er over en gang for alle....

Jamen hvad forventede I? De indkaldte ingen saakaldte "skeptics" og alle medlemmerne havde stemt for Storbritannien's egen AGW lov "The Climate Change Act" som nu er trodt i kraft. I kan laese om den her:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7550164/Climate-Change-Act-has-the-biggest-ever-bill.html
Konsekvenserne bliver at mere og mere industri bliver drevet til Oesten og der bliver flere of flere uden beskaeftigelse her i Storbritannien.
Der var overhovedet ingen mulighed for at de ikke ville "frikende" Dr Jones for hvis de ikke havde gjort det ville det have vaeret det samme som at sige at vi valgte forkert da vi stemte paa denne nye lov.
Hvis det her AGW sjov fortsaetter saa bliver al industri drevet ud af Europa og USA/Kanada. Det bliver enden paa Vesten's velstand. Vores boern har noget at se frem til. Kina som verden's naeste stormagt. Hurra Hurra.

Der er alt for meget praediken og ikke nok videnskab fra AGW tilhaengerne. Jeg vil gerne se mere aerlighed og mindre forbandelse af dem der toer at vaere skeptisk d.v.s. rigtige videnskabsmaend

Samt mindre kollektiv/kollegial censur af anderledes tænkende/skrivende!

McKitrick claims:

There was some excitement when a blogger found a minor error in our computer code (we had released the code at the time of publication), but we sent a correction to the journal right away and showed that the results hardly changed.

The "minor" error was confusing degrees with radians. As I wrote at the time:

correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it from 0.16 (out of 0.27) to 0.09. McKitrick's correction states:

Outside the dry/cold regions the measured temperature change is significantly (previous: primarily ) influenced by economic and social variables.

That's quite a difference, so how can he say that their conclusions were not affected? Well, all the conclusion says is that there were socioeconomic effects, without mentioning their size. The size of the effects, which change substantially, are only mentioned in the body.

Secondly, Gavin Schmidt has conclusively demonstrated that McKitrick's correlations of temperature trends with economic indices are spurious, by showing that you get similarly "significant" correlations with trends from climate models which are independent by construction of such indices.

Thirdly, McKitrick has known about the problems with his theory for about ten years now. See Robert Grumbine's comments on the first (unpublished) version of McKitrick's theory:

He was fooling around with correlating per capita income with the observed temperature changes. He concluded that the warming was a figment of climatologists imaginations, as there was a correlation between money and warming. 'Obviously' this had to be due to wealth creating the warming in the dataset, rather than any climate change---his conclusion.

Along the way he:

1) selected a subset of temperature records
1a) without using a random method
1b) without paying attention to spatial distribution
1c) without ensuring that the records were far enough apart to be independant---ok, I shouldn't say 'he' did it, because he didn't. He blindly took a selection that his student made and which was---to my eyes---distributed quite peculiarly.

2) Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but for some other folks: Surface temperature records are correlated across fairly substantial distances---a few hundred km. This is what makes paleoreconstructions possible, and what makes it possible to initialize global numerical weather prediction models with so few observations.)

3) Ignored that we do expect, and have reason to expect that the warming will be higher in higher latitudes

4) Ignored that the wealthy countries are at higher latitudes

Hence my calling it fooling around rather than work or study. He was, he said, submitting that pile of tripe* to a journal.
*pile of tripe being my term, not his.

and

His main conclusion was regarding climate change---namely that there isn't any. His secondary conclusion was that climate people studying climate data were idiots. Neither of those is a statement of economics, so my knowledge of economics is irrelevant (though, in matter of fact, it is far greater than his knowledge of climate; this says little, as his displayed level doesn't challenge a bright jr. high student.).

Indeed, it may well be that McKitrick's travails merely demonstrate that the peer-review system is working as it ought to.

Criticism of a McKitrick paper
Tim Lambert has criticised McKitrick's own data analysis in a 2004 paper with Patrick Michaels.
Among other things, Lambert found a bug in which the input to a cosine function was in degrees instead of radians. The authors have acknowledged the error and published a corrected version. They claim that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected. McKitrick has pointed out that Lambert was only able to spot the bug because the data and code used in the paper were put on a website upon publication, as is usual in econometrics but rare in climate reconstructions.

Among other things, Lambert found a bug in which the input to a cosine function was in degrees instead of radians. The authors have acknowledged the error and published a corrected version. They claim that the effects were "very small", that the correction "improved the overall fit", and that their overall conclusion was unaffected.

....correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it from 0.16 (out of 0.27) to 0.09.

The green line shows the 25-year linear trend (0.19 ºC per decade). The blue lines show the two most recent ten-year trends (0.18 ºC per decade for 1998-2007, 0.19 ºC per decade for 1999-2008) and illustrate that these recent decadal trends are entirely consistent with the long-term trend and IPCC predictions.

... det er 6 år siden, jeg ved du er bagefter, men så meget?

.....en systematisk optagelse af håbløse, useriøse eller fejlfyldte artikler [underminerer] peer-review-begrebets troværdighed – og der kommer jo vitterligt useriøse bidrag igennem hos søvnige – eller værre: useriøse – reviewere ind i mellem.

Det er ikke sket for mig, at jeg har lavet den RAD/grad fejl, men sådan er vi jo så forskellige.

alphaomega skrev:
Selv videnskabsmaend saasom Dr Roy Spencer og Professor Lindzen tror at der nok er et CO2 print men det er maaske kun 20% og resten er naturlig opvarming der maaske falder tilbage igen. Vi har jo set lidt afkoeling siden 2002. Det kan fortsaette eller ikke. Hvem ved i virkeligheden?

Myrlin skrev:
3.) CO2 er varmeproducerende idet den har den nærmest enkeltstående energetiske sammenhang til at binde en del af solens energi og videregive den til andre atomer/molekyler